TikTok star priest Matthieu Jasseron bids farewell to the Church

The first time The World met him, he was wearing a Roman collar and a small silver cross pinned to his jacket pocket, and went by the name “Father Matthieu.” A year later, he was dressed in a hoodie, gray jeans and sneakers, his hair lightly tousled with gel and sporting stubble. At 39, he reclaimed his birth name, Matthieu Jasseron, after leaving the priesthood last summer. Just before our mid-November meeting at a Parisian café, he lit up a cigarette on the sidewalk, a little nervously. France’s best-known priest, with a million and a half followers on various social media sites, has shocked the Catholic world with his “spiritual coming out.”

In a 45-minute video posted on October 20, Jasseron explained, against a bucolic backdrop, why he threw in the towel. It had nothing to do with the motives usually invoked by his peers, said the parish priest for Joigny, in north-central France. “It’s not about a chick, a guy, sanctions, scandals, sex, excommunication or anything like that, it runs much deeper,” he said, in the direct, no-nonsense style that made him a TikTok sensation.

He then listed in a somewhat haphazard and sometimes confused manner – despite the choppy editing, revealing multiple takes – a litany of grievances: “I was abused, insulted, manipulated,” he said, before going on to describe a “physical assault” by a bishop, being barred by local intelligence from attending a Mass, a “breach of the seal of confession” and “intimidation.” “I’ve lived through the worst year of my life,” he said, visibly scarred.

Speaking to The Worldhe put his thoughts in order: “I felt too out of sync,” both with his parishioners and his hierarchy. “I insist on having an interpretive faith, but that was not what was expected of me,” he said. “For me, the question isn’t whether a Palestinian walked on water 2,000 years ago or whether Mary was a virgin. What matters is the legacy passed on: The Christian faith has transformed the world and the Gospels are the best self-help manual of all time.”

Major blow

As he answered more and more questions from internet users, he began to ask more of his own. “I have a practical faith,” he said “I understand that this might not sit well with the Church.” It’s a Church he paints in stark terms: “authoritarian” and “all-encompassing,” “a breeding ground for abuse,” which “operates like a political party with people whose primary concern is preserving the organization rather than doing good.” He criticized the fact that “out of the 31 parishes in Yonne, only two have taken in migrants, even though all of them have unused spaces.”

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